Welsh-born director Gareth Evans is not a gentleman. Well, at least not onscreen.

He's only 33, but he's old school. The punches, kicks and chops in his films are realistic - no CGI or wirework needed. To fulfill his dream of making kinetic martial arts films worthy of Bruce Lee or early Jackie Chan, Evans moved halfway around the world to Indonesia and found his instrument of destruction at a martial arts school in Jakarta, a shy, unassuming young fellow named Iko Uwais, a master of the ancient Indonesian discipline of silat.

Starting with their first two films - "Merantau" (2009) and the low-budget body cruncher "The Raid: Redemption" (2011) - the Evans-Uwais team has taken over Indonesian cinema. Their new film, "The Raid 2," is a big-budget sequel that has become the highest-grossing film in Indonesian history.

"He's never been afraid of anything," Evans said of Uwais, 31, during a visit with him to present the film at the Metreon last month. "Except when I asked him to take his clothes off! He can punch people, kick people, stab people, but not undress."

Evans' dream with "The Raid 2" was to make not only a martial arts classic but an action classic. To get a car chase that rivals anything seen on film ("Bullitt" and "The French Connection" come to mind), Evans shut off main streets in Jakarta for days, snaring already clogged local traffic ("I learned about every swear word in Indonesian," Evans joked). The final epic fight scene took 10 days to film and contains 196 shots.

Sony Pictures Classics bought the film for U.S. release and, despite its foreign language, is opening the film wide in more than a dozen theaters in the Bay Area and hundreds across the country.

Evans believes part of that is due to his commitment to keeping it real. No cars flipping over and twisting through the air like a cartoon (a la "Need for Speed"), no martial artists making nonsensical leaps dozens of feet into the air.

"There's actually a surprisingly high amount of CGI in the film, but I use it to aid rather than create, and it's done in a subtle way," Evans said. "It can be something as simple as a blood pack explodes on a body, and we just expand a little bit further and add a few drops - I did a lot of that.

"But I do prefer to keeps things practical, and ground our action in reality. I want it to be like if you know martial arts, you can say 'I can do this too.' "

There's even an amazing shot during the car chase when the camera seems to pass through a car in motion and comes out the other side. Obviously, there must be computer effects used there, right?

"No. We passed the camera through," Evans said, saying the pass started with the director of photography on one side of the car. "The second DOP is actually dressed as one of the seats. The camera comes in through the window and he just grabs it. On the other side of the car crouching right by the tires on a platform is another camera assistant, so the second DOP passes it to him through the back window.

Video: Anatomy of a Scene: The Raid 2

"It was a morale booster. We know we did that, that we didn't rely on CGI. We did it for real."

If you go

The Raid 2: Starts Friday at Bay Area theaters. To see director Gareth Evans' anatomy of a scene from the film, go to http://bit.ly/1dKN63l.